Possible Layoffs at Twitter

Jack Dorsey was officially named the permanent CEO of Twitter earlier this week, and in large part he got the job was that as a co-founder, Dorsey isn’t afraid to make the tough, necessary decisions and he isn’t wasting much time.

The downsizing comes at the same time Twitter is restructuring its engineering organization to make it leaner and more efficient, these sources say. It’s likely that many of those impacted by the layoffs will be engineers, which make up about half of the company’s staff.

A Twitter spokesperson told media outlets, “We’re not commenting on rumor and speculation.”

Those close to the company have argued for years that Twitter had to trim some of the fat. It reported roughly 4,100 employees last quarter, more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO. Twitter’s user base has grown less than 50 percent in that period. Of course, some of the growth has come through acquisitions Twitter has made over the past two years. But still, the feeling from those close to the company is that Twitter’s engineering team is much larger than it needs to be.